Game Changer?

question of the week by Professor Bulliet: on Fundamentalists.

On the Saudi side, modernist businessmen who wear their Islam lightly and have summer escape-the-heat homes in Houston or London or Nice look down on the atavistic mud wrestling that characterizes contemporary American democracy and look to the Chinese model of centralized development for a road map to the future.

Devout Wahhabis, on the other hand, see the American fist, rather than President Obama’s extended hand, wherever they look in the Islamic world. And everyone is hyperconscious of Israel’s influence on American policies. There’s no changing this situation.Oil and geopolitics indissolubly bind the two countries.

Unless, of course, the hinterland zealots on one side or the other should actually succeed in seizing control of the government. (Contrary to popular belief, Wahhabi divines do not currently have the power to push King Abdullah around.)

A Saudi Arabia ruled by Osama bin Laden would not be America’s friend and partner. Nor would an America governed by the Tea Party be looked on with equanimity by a Saudi king. Could such a game-changing shift in power come about in either country? No. At least not according to our historical master narrative devoted to the rise of modernity.

The world has boarded the globalization express and is hell-bent on a WTO paradise. But what if the counternarrative of yahoo-hinterlands-pushing-back-hard-against-the-modernizers has substance?

What if those who see secular humanism as an amoral distraction from faith are thinking actors, and not just mindless scarecrows put up to keep the globalizers on their toes? Can we face the future with any confidence when our reading of the past excludes, demeans or explains away the forces that seem increasingly to be real? If we are to ignore this telos, the inexorable forces of history may push back violently against the naysayers who cannot fathom a world that must reconcile religiosity with the Enlightenment. More by

Professor Bulliet of Columbia University has an excellent series of lectures on youtube on world history, and others about the Islamic world. I believe his specialty is Iran. But what really impressed me is he wrote an entire book on the development of the wheel in history. so he is not a pure ideologue.

I found this article on Scribd, (which requires a subscription) It was originally published here, which requires a subscription.

A lot of thoughtful stuff, including the observation of how the outliers tend to change civilizations, and the similarities between heartland America and the Islamic fundamentalists, not as violent bozos (which is how the press portrays them) but as people of faith who see things differently than the modern meme.

and note that part about gamechanger.

Hmm... No Tea Party or Fundie, but Trump seems to be such a game changer, but not a radical but one who does represent the outliers in the US...

and I won't even guess what is going on in Saudi.

And this explains why the Republican establishment hates him as much as the Democratic ubersocialist hate him.

by the way: in the article he also mentions two peasant revolts against the Emperor of China in the 1800's, both led by religious zealots.

Something to keep in mind when you read the meme about that country.